The only way to keep the bully from punching you in the nose whenever he likes is to kick him in the nuts. You might get thrashed anyway, or maybe not. If you can land a few shots he may decide the price he has to pay to bloody your nose is too high.
In any case, the bully will continue to violate your sovereignty, so to speak, until forcefully discouraged from doing so.
The United States drone strategy is only pursued against people and countries who, largely, cannot effectively defend themselves. There is no way for them to give us a good one right in the nuts.
And so today we read from the New York Times, the continued use of drones in Iraq whether they like it or not. Further, the paper notes this was revealed in a call for bids to operate the drones, issued by the State Department. That is, bombing paupers is ripe for mercenary defense contracting.
Mr. Asadi said that he opposed the drone program: “Our sky is our sky, not the U.S.A.’s sky.???
The Pentagon and C.I.A. have been stepping up their use of armed Predator and Reaper drones to conduct missile strikes against militants in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. More recently, the United States has expanded drone bases in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and a secret location in the Arabian Peninsula.
Over the weekend, Pine View Farm pointed out a story on a navy drone, one developed to be used without a remote pilot’s chair.
Published at the Los Angeles Times, the story follows in the mainstream media tradition of never stating the obvious, mostly because it’s embarrassing or unpleasant.
A couple years ago Hollywood produced a summer blockbuster on an autonomous drone. It was a a bad sci-fi-ish adventure/buddy movie called Stealth.
The drone, named “EDI” (pronounced “Eddy”) talked, went rogue, stole all its music off the Internet, and saved the day at the end.
A Wikipedia entry on it drily notes it was a “colossal box office bomb.”
Crap movie. Unlike being stuck in the real, you could walk out of the theatre and tell your friends not to see it.
For the movie, the enemy actually had forces — fighter planes and anti-aircraft flak, not that it did much good.
However, in the real world the US employs drones exclusively in places and on people who can’t defend themselves. Iran included, the high altitude stealth drone being an exception to the rule that cost the country something when it malfunctioned. However, overflying Iran with Predators — which do the lion’s share of the drone work — would seem not to be done.
Increasing amounts of money on robotics technology is used on places and peoples with essentially nothing, either for themselves or in the quiver.
And none of the allegedly wise people who get talked to for these kinds of news stories bring up this matter. Instead they go on about side issues — like “what if a theoretically artificially intelligence-equipped drone makes a wrong killing decision?” Never mind there is already a long history of wrong decisions routinely made by the people directing them.
So as the robots become more sophisticated they are used on those left farther and farther behind in the global economy. This is all written off as pro-active work making Americans secure, guaranteeing there is always some further price to be paid for being in a desperate situation and hating America for all its freedoms (to bomb).
Whether the drones get some petty bad guys or not hardly matters. It just matters that there be an increasing market and budget for them.
???More aggressive robotry development could lead to deploying far fewer U.S. military personnel to other countries, achieving greater national security at a much lower cost and most importantly, greatly reduced casualties,??? aerospace pioneer Simon Ramo, who helped develop the intercontinental ballistic missile, wrote in his new book, ‘Let Robots Do the Dying.’ ???
Well, the air force and navy — the new autonomous prototype drone is being tested off an aircraft carrier — aren’t doing any dying now.
The only dying, and it’s fairly obvious to all except perhaps the ballistic missile expert, is done by those where the drones are overhead.
The pirates off Somalia can’t fight back against robotic or manned systems. They can’t fight back in Indonesia or Yemen or in Afghanistan. And the drones operate in Pakistan where there is largely no Pakistani army to say boo to them.
So it’s all rubbish.
There isn’t a conventional force the US is going to fight which could inflict any serious casualties because those with such armed forces aren’t won’t be pushed into a war with us and, further, we most probably won’t be fighting them. These wars are all by the wealthy country with the biggest world military against those who have nothing except their poverty and enmity. (If there is some manner of war with Iran, you watch how quickly it turns into bombing with impunity. And that thought may have something to do with why the mullahs want an atomic bomb.)
This is what made much of the Stealth movie silly. The scriptwriters, unlike our national security experts, had to at least try to sell something on the screen that seemed slightly real. There had to be an enemy to expose the heroes, even the robot one, to danger. They failed but, hey, they gave it a shot.
Our theoreticians don’t even make the pretense of trying. They’ll just take the money whether it’s eventually a colossal bomb or not.
From the content/word cloup app at GlobalSecurity.Org, in working over copy mirrored there.
Unless, maybe, you’re a fanboi of The Dangerous Room of Examining US Tech for Killing Other People, All Smaller and Poorer blog, you can smile at the accidental poetry software makes of a collection of DD-minted slurs and pejoratives used to more accurately describe the world of national security.
Moe is dead, of course. Persecuting Paupers, Maim People and National Security Business sound like good names for indie bands in some college town.
If you have gold and your ass don’t smell/We won’t bomb you straight to hell. — The National Anthem
No one will say it in formal circles: Use of drones outside the US is all about bombing paupers or — ahem — the impoverished places of the world, if something less blunt sounding is needed. That’s the US strategic plan coupled to the story on budget cuts. It’s a strategic triad with two of legs — drones and special forces — aimed at going after people who largely cannot defend themselves in any serious way, always poorer, weaker, and generally of different color and religion in desperate regions. And the third leg of the triad — the Navy — is aimed at people who definitely can shoot back, the Chinese. But whom we won’t get into a war with for the obvious reason that they make all our pipe and wires and telephones and computers and underwear and everything else except drones and most of the kit that the special forces use.
Here’s a thought question: Do you really think those places where drones now operate freely threaten the existence of the civilian populace of the US in any meaningful way?
Exclude incitements to commit violence against Americans from Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia.
Exclude kidnappings by pauper/pirates unless you actually believe such things may eventually threaten people in, say, Pasadena, CA. These are bad but people get shot near my neighborhood by gang members about once a year and you don’t see the governor going off and demanding pinpoint assassinations from the air in retaliation now, do you?
What are the ramifications, not internally but worldwide, of being seen as using remote-control technology to erase handfuls of paupers (and civilians who are in the wrong place at the wrong time) in places where people don’t have a chance of shooting them down? Because, like, they have no money to afford a modern military for national defense.
On a scale, with 1 being an image as a villain and 10 that of someone someone riding to the rescue, where do you think the current usage and future trending of drones falls?
Discuss where domestic drone operations are necessary but only where they aren’t already used.
Exclude use on the Mexican border which also falls under chasing paupers. However, do discuss how deep into Mexican airspace drones operate or should be allowed to go.
Do you think drones are necessary, for example, over southern California highways, to monitor traffic? If so, how would a drone alleviate bumper to bumper traffic during hours of peak congestion?
If there was a natural disaster, how are drones superior to a helicopter or manned plane, for example, if looking for people stranded by rising levels of water?
Are drones necessary to hunt down meth labs in abandoned shacks and barns in the hinterlands? Is this a new innovation/application or just using a more expensive technology to chase paupers?
On a scale, 1 being “it’s just chasing/persecuting paupers??? and 10 being it’s “a new way to keep everyone safe???, rate what you think the increasing domestic use of drones means.
On a scale, 1 being “it’s just wealth preservation for arms manufacturers??? and 10 being “it’s a cutting edge of innovation and technology and needs to be supported,??? rate what you think the desire for more drones means.
Remember what I said about nobody in formal circles coming right out and saying the strategy is to bomb paupers? It’s true. Over ten years they’ve come up with another way to describe it.
Here’s an example from what you’ve come to know as the Empire’s Dog Feces beat, from the famous Internet magazine/blog, The Dangerous Room of Examining US Tech for Killing Other People, All Smaller and Poorer (no link):
When Adm. Eric Olson, the former leader of U.S. Special Operations Command, wanted to explain where his forces were going, he would show audiences a photo that NASA took, titled “The World at Night.??? The lit areas showed the governed, stable, orderly parts of the planet. The areas without lights were the danger zones — the impoverished, the power vacuums, the places overrun with militants that prompted the attention of elite U.S. troops. And few places were darker, in Olson’s eyes, than East Africa.
Instead of “The World at Night,” it calls out for an acronym, something national security staffers, wonks and military men could grab onto.
First I thought of Defending Against Those Who Hate Us For Our Freedom (to Bomb Them). But it has too many consonants to acronym-ize. And it doesn’t quite cover all the people who don’t know we’re coming for them yet because they’re not having money and electricity are markers for America-threatening terrorism.
Instead, here’s an alternative: the GWOP, or Global War on Paupers. It had a neatness to it, superseding — as it does, the Global War on Terror.
In comments from the last post tagged to the Made In China tab Chuck pointed to comprehensive National Science Foundation/National Science Board analyses of trends and statistics in US research and development as compared to the rest of the developed world.
The above plot, just one from many, clearly shows the US national research and development commitment to homeland security and bombing paupers worldwide as a result of the war on terror. It is the only area of research funding not particularly affected by the worldwide economic downturn. Although a leveling is seen in the last two years, the overall level of commitment to finding new applications in bombing and hounding others less fortunate outside national borders remains quite high. (The larger original version, if you don’t know how to use the browser magnifier, is here.)
Non-military research funding from the federal government shows a clear spike associated with Barack Obama’s stimulus package. When the stimulus abated, in comparison to allocations for bombing paupers, spending plunged.
The recently released Department of Defense Non-Lethal Weapons Reference Book shows the current listing of mostly useless gadgets, some of which can kill or maim people, currently fielded for the US military. Some have bled into US police forces as a result of the weapons manufacturing boom and national militarization brought on by the forever war on terror. And we know how bombing fear and anxiety worldwide has worked out. Good for share value at the Raytheons!
In the past the military’s non-lethal wish list was crapped up with really bad notions proffered by a variety of boffins from the national labs and small business America. These encompassed the idea you could use or develop exotic chemicals to spray on people and hardware.
This meant sticky foams, suds and various agents to allegedly corrode metal or disable people. Over more than a decade none of this panned out.
Or a very few sensible people figured out spraying toxic chemicals around, in effect — trying to imitate industrial accidents on a small scale as a way of destroying equipment and controlling crowds, was a genuinely nuts thing.
So that’s gone.
In the place of it, a doubling down on trivial engineering applications in dousing people with pepper spray or blinding them with green lasers.
Does the US military (and, by extension, the police forces of this nation and those who buy from us) really need a Claymore mine redesigned to blast protesters with little hard rubber balls?
One could easily make a decent case against it.
There is also a fetish for using loud noise broadcasting devices to control crowds and deter terror frogmen. (“What terror frogmen?” I hear you ask. Exactly.) In any case, earplugs render the dollar investment a total waste.
In the totally notional area, the US military still wants to use non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse rays. This bit of wishing has been going on for almost twenty years.
As always, it wants to put nullifying electric rays in drones, on small naval vessels, everywhere you can imagine for spraying at all the alleged cars, boats, planes and other whirring things of those on the other side of the barriers of Fortress America.
However, these projects are all dubbed “conceptual.”
In the real world that translates as: Can’t make them work. And this is for various reasons, all having to do with over-reliance on magical thinking and limitations imposed by the laws of physics and nature.
They’re kept alive mostly as high button corporate welfare for electrical and aerospace engineers. They would be as productive if paid to dig holes and fill them back up the next day.
Keenly aware of conventional U.S. military dominance in the region, Iran has adopted what strategists describe as an “asymmetric” approach.
Missiles mounted on civilian trucks can be concealed around the coastline, tiny civilian dhows and fishing vessels can be used to lay mines, and midget submarines can be hidden in the shallows to launch more sophisticated “smart mines” and homing torpedoes.
Iran is also believed to have built up fleets of perhaps hundreds of small fast attack craft including tiny suicide speedboats, learning from the example of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels who used such methods in a war with the government.
Sri Lanka, the island country which a long time ago was known as Ceylon — most will instinctively know, doesn’t have a Fifth Fleet.
“Assymetric,” of course, is the sickeningly overused jargon-word used to make something sound intellectual and fancy for stupid people — in this case, the description of the natural state of affairs that exists when a really small or lousy (or small and lousy) military is compared to ours.
It’s assymetric! We spend 100,000 times as much or even more as Iran does on our military, forcing them into assymetry! A comparison chart of the US and Iranian navies appears to be greatly assymetrical! That is, it lacks symmetry!
This is only to say the best minds aren’t our military theorists and national security experts. A number of whom are consulted for the news piece linked above, furnishing stuff you could have come up with for much less. Which also informs us their purpose is not really to provide any great value. It never is, the real function being to add a pseudo-scholarly quality to the assessment of war.
After all, where are we if we do not have our natsec think tank experts and retired military men to tell us such things? Rhetorical, obviously.
“They [Iran] can cause a great deal of mischief… but it depends how much pain they are willing to accept,” one of these personnel, Nikolas Gvosdev, “professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island,” tells the news agency.
The US Naval War College, for those from abroad who don’t, is not quite the same thing as the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD.
The former’s website is here. Located in the capitol for old swank money in Rhode Island, Newport, its website announces the school recently awarded someone you don’t know the “Hattendorf Prize.”
The Hattendorf Prize!
“The Hattendorf Prize was established on 7 December 2010 and first awarded in 2011,” informs Wiki.
Anyway, the “Nicholas Gvosdev” also posts at SITREP, the GlobalSecurity.Org blog to which this place syndicates posts.
The Atlantic Community has launched a new series of essays looking at the future of European security, specifically in resourcing and procurement …
Well, you’ve had enough of that to get the idea.
So now you know what you need to about potential war with the Iranian navy and our national security scholars for today. Iran loses 99 percent of its assets right quick in a shooting war over blocking Hormuz.
It was harmless and goofy, good for color stories in the news and on television for years.
In modern America, there are plaster casters all over the place. In the culture of lickspittle it’s been turned into a serious career track.
And by this I don’t mean people who fluff rockstars so their tumescence can be lovingly preserved. I mean it far more metaphorically, as in those who act as fellatrices for various agencies and industries in our allegedly technologically superior country.
Now consider for a moment what author Paul Fussell had to say in his book, Bad, on truly wretched publications and their audiences, well before the advent of digital publishing:
“[Down] to magazines aimed at the mentally ill, like Majesty: The Monthly Royal Review, for people who get an erection when they think of the Queen Mother — or rather her privileges, furniture and jewels — and Soldier of Fortune, for people who fantasize about plunging a trench knife into a foreigner of color, generally smaller than themselves.”
Fussell never imagined the explosion of things of this ilk on the network called the web. Print kept the number of such pubs small because even though execrable, it still took a good deal of money and resources to do it right.
However, web publishing did away with all that and, today, in full cooperation with the culture of lickspittle and its glory, there are literally hundreds of digital pubs for those who get hard reading about the products of US weapons shops.
And because there is a big audience with such a pathology, the publications that serve them are essentially groupie mags — like Tiger Beat — only staffed with journalists who write daily swooning copy on what I’ve called The Empire’s Dog Feces.
Tasers that elicit excruciating spasms in one person at a time? Foam pellets that send an entire crowd fleeing in agony? Pfft. So 2011. Where non-lethal weapons are concerned, the future’s all about sonic microwaves that can make swimmers puke mid-stroke, and aircraft with laser beams that can redirect an entire enemy plane mid-flight.
Or, at least, those are the deepest, darkest wishes of the Pentagon agency responsible for non-lethal weapons.
The military’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate’s “Non-Lethal Weapons Reference Book,??? leaked online last week by PublicIntelligence.org, is a terrifying treasure trove that describes dozens of ways — some already in-use, others in development or still mere fantasy — for military and law enforcement officials to make you wish they were using the real bullets.
A total of 14 weapons, according to the reference book, are currently being fielded. Some of ‘em, you’ve heard of. Good old tasers, which the guide helpfully reminds us “can penetrate 2 inches of clothing??? in order to “totally disable an individual,??? and guns that shoot 600 rubber pellets filled with pepper spray …
This, of course, from the famous publication that’s done everything humanly possible to own the beat.
However, there are lots of rivals and this week’s best came from Digital Trends, a Yahoo news agency:
The United States military has been making great strides with the development and use of unmanned drones for some time now. Military drones are generally used to gather intel and perform reconnaissance missions into enemy territory or other hostile environments. Thankfully, such technology allows for a vast array of benefits, perhaps most importantly eliminating the need of placing soldier’s lives in danger during recon missions.
Yes, thankfully, such technology allows for a vast array of benefits when one is doing the modern version of Fussell’s “plunging a trench knife into a foreigner of color, generally smaller than themselves.” Which, of course, is letting a guided missile off the chain at some nonspecific group of paupers who can’t shoot back on the other side of the globe.
It’s hard for me to imagine someone actually writing this type of copy without immediately lapsing into superciliousness and slurs. Nevertheless, there are people who do it every day.
While most drones utilized by the military take the shape of airplanes, the new Argus-IS is a different breed of drone that takes the form of a helicopter. While planes require space to take off and land, the Argus-IS does not.
That, of course, isn’t the only attribute that makes the Argus-IS a formidable new piece of military tech. We all know how fond the military is of acronyms and the Argus-IS, which stands for Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Imaging System doesn’t disappoint. However, it’s not the Argus-IS’ long name that impresses, or even its ability to hover in place or take off without a landing strip, what truly sets the Argus-IS apart from other drones is its 1.8 gigapixel camera …
Currently, the Argus-IS is undergoing testing, but will reportedly be deployed in Afghanistan by the end of the new year.
Pucker up those lips. The editor will warm the mix.
Here’s a kook summary for the end of the year, all brought on by the wide publicizing of Newt Gingrich’s love for electromagnetic pulse doom mythology. I correctly called Gingrich’s bubble about to burst a week ago. His mania for electromagnetic pulse doom stories proved unpalatable, along with many other things, to many.
However, Gingrich will always have the EMPAct America yearly conference at Niagara Falls. (Joke: You’ve won first prize in a travel lottery — a weekend in Niagara Falls! Second prize is a week in Niagara Falls!)
From the wires, on electromagnetic pulses ending civilization, still echoing from the examination of Gingrich’s personal fancy:
Apocalypse 2012 — an obscure author who specializes in the end-times/survivalism fringe market, curses US politicians for not doing enough to save us from a coronal mass ejection.
“If [EMP doom] sounds far fetched, then you haven’t spoken to Lawrence Joseph, a Los Angeles-based writer who has spent much of his life preaching this frighteningly plausible vision of the Apocalypse,” it reads.
“As only politicians can, they dashed the hopes of a healthy civilization,” the man told CTV News.
Written by one of EMPAct America’s lobbyists, the article is distraught over the New York Times piece on Gingrich and EMP doom.
The Russian newspaper, Pravda, has delivered us a warning, one to heed:
[If] the U.S. continues in its attempts to fight terrorists and provide support to our NATO partners, we will “provoke” an EMP attack that will kill many millions, potentially end civilization as we know it, and ultimately result in the loss of our sovereignty. This warning is not the first to have emanated from Russia. One of the most notable was described in testimony before a House Armed Services Committee Hearing held on July 22, 2004—a high-level Russian official (Chairman of the International Affairs Committee) had issued a similar threat to two sitting Congressmen while discussing U.S. involvement in the former Yugoslavia.
The Russians are not alone. An EMP attack against the United States has been written about and discussed openly within China, North Korea, and Iran …
“It is therefore baffling that the New York Times would take an obviously partisan stance to a major threat,” it continues.
Cryptome publishes a notice in the Federal Register on a meeting to be held on January 9 by the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Committee. Public comments on threats delivered to the Committee to be published later at regulations.gov.
Sensitive Threat Briefings against the Homeland.
Briefing on Strategic Implementation Plan to Counter Violent
Extremism Domestically.
Update on Border Security and Evolving Threats.
US Coast Guard, Update on Counterterrorism Efforts Around the
World.
TSA Frequent Travelers Program Operational Update.
Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Threat–Lessons Learned and Areas of
Vulnerability, and
Evolving Threats in Cyber Security.
Basis for Closure: In accordance with Section 10(d) of the Federal
Advisory Committee Act, it has been determined that the meeting
requires closure as the premature disclosure of the information would
not be in the public interest.
Alert readers will have noticed that DHS threat analysis can be moved by newsmedia subject matter — even when there is no actual threat imminent menace at the root of such stories.
That is, if enough people are talking about electromagnetic pulse doom, even though the net result has been skepticism and damage to a presidential political campaign, homeland security is moved to be briefed on the notional matter.
Also worth consideration: Briefing on Strategic Implementation Plan to Counter Violent Extremism Domestically.
Generally speaking, there was no violent domestic extremism in 2011 unless one counts the Giffords shooting. And Occupy Wall Street is not armed.
In fact, the FBI’s end of year list of top ten terror cases is a paltry one, domestically consisting only a people nabbed in a variety of wanna-be plots uncovered by the loose chatter of those arrested.
Coincidentally, and earlier this this month, DD blog has posted extensively on the extremism and heavily armed survivalists associated with the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy.
The script: The US will collapse soon, through an unspecified series of disasters which include (but are not limited to) total electrical grid failure, rampant bioterrorist-spread disease, and the death of money. Only those in the country, on farms with their own fruit trees, vegetable crops, chainsaws for cutting firewood, elevated water supply, and Bible-reading skills will survive. You will have to defend yourself from the hordes fleeing the cities, just like in AMC’s The Walking Dead.
You must view all three Urban Danger teasers to get the full bit. (I jumped on the grenades so you don’t have to.) But watching the one posted, if you can endure it, delivers the general idea. There ain’t no progressives in this bunch. Or children and other young people, it would appear.
This old white Christian paranoid End Times mania is inseparable from the electromagnetic pulse attack story. And the political professional EMP lobby has always nourished it.
These days it’s virtually mainstream due to adoption by significant segments of the country’s dysfunctional and increasingly irrational political class.
Number 2 on the FBI list of top stories/arrests in terrorism/violent extremism.
In addition to the threats, Iran has started a 10-day naval exercise to demonstrate what it calls “asymmetrical warfare,??? a military doctrine aimed at defeating U.S. aircraft carriers in a potential Persian Gulf conflict by using swarms of rocket-mounted speedboats and a barrage of missiles.
DD blog gamed it, as part of a larger thing which included going after the Iranian nuclear program, in 2007.
